Despite a significant expansion of the literature on conflicts and fragility of states, only a few systematic attempts have been made to link the theoretical literature on social conflicts to the available micro-level information about the people who are involved in these conflicts. We address...

Affirmative action has been at the heart of public policies towards the socially disadvantaged in India. Compensatory discrimination policies which have been adopted for the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) since independence were recommended for Other Backward Classes (OBC) by...

With the use of panel data constructed from the 1995 and 1997 Bulgarian Integrated Household Surveys, this paper explores the sectoral reallocation of labour by gender. In Bulgaria, men and women started the transition on an almost equal standing, allowing us to concentrate our attention on the...

We argue that a purpose of foreign aid is to whet the appetite of the recipient in order to bring about a long term commitment to what the donor perceives as a need, but which the recipient may rank lower down on his list of undertakings, or may be sufficiently resource constrained as to be...

This paper analyzes the decentralization of decision-making in aid-giving in a theoretical rent-seeking framework. In this analysis the root donor establishes a necessary criterion for potential recipients: good governance. The potential recipients compete in hierarchal contests for funds. The...

Ethnic networks are a way of overcoming informal barriers to trade such as information costs, risk, and uncertainty by building trust and by substituting for the difficulty of enforcing contracts internationally. We study networks which emerge from the interaction (i) between migrants and...

East Germany, a unique socialist command economy prior to the 1990s, underwent rapid transition to a market-oriented economic system. This transition has been of intense interest given the environment of Eastern Germany vis-a-vis Western Germany, a setting different from most other transition...

We review the role immigration amnesties have played in US immigration policy, placing them in the context of similar programs embarked upon by other nations. The theory of amnesties suggests rent-seeking, bargaining, and costs as reasons for a country offering an amnesty, often in conjunction...

This paper decomposes differences in poverty incidence (head count ratio) using estimates from a regression equation, synthesizing the approaches proposed in World Bank (2003) and Yun (2004). A significance test is developed for characteristics and coefficients effects when decomposing...

This paper analyzes the determinants of rural poverty in India, contrasting the situation of scheduled caste (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) households with the non-scheduled population. The incidence of poverty in SC and ST households is much higher than among non-scheduled households. By...